Exploring oppositionality and support of Counter-Strike redditors for the World ESports Association

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores sentiments towards the World ESports Association (WESA) within a Counter-Strike Reddit community. Esports communities have not embraced the various self-proclaimed domestic and international esports governing organisations and are notoriously hostile to any organisation perceived as exploiting them. Our sentiment analysis was based on a review of 5359 comments (distributed across 29 threads and five subreddits) made by Counter-Strike Redditors. We retained 861 of these comments in our final data set. Provisional themes were revised until the main categories were finalised. The key finding was that negative sentiments outweigh positive sentiments. Counter-Strike Redditors criticised WESA for subsequent monopolisation and unnecessary interference in an otherwise functional system, corruption, a lack of transparency and power, and its opportunistic financial behaviour. More positively, WESA is credited with standardising rules and setting standards, enhancing player welfare and protection, growing esports, and offsetting publisher power and incompetence. Despite these sentiments, we propose that esports communities’ influence on institutional considerations is likely to be limited. There is an ongoing tension between the initial understanding of gaming and its institutionalisation process. Acquiring player/fan acceptance is an ongoing challenge for these organisations.